A standalone publication for B2B content with Amit Bivas, VP Global Marketing at Optimove

By Jodi Norris 01 June, 2021

A standalone publication for B2B content can provide an excellent platform for brand awareness. Not only can it position your company as thought leaders within your field, it can generate leads and build trust.

On the FINITE Podcast for B2B tech marketers, Alex talked to Amit Bivas, VP Global Marketing at Optimove. As part of his marketing strategy Amit created PostFunnel, an online publication for CRM marketers. Alex and Amit talk about why a publication can boost growth, how to start one and common content challenges.

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And check out more of the FINITE B2B marketing podcast here! 

Full Transcript

Alex (00:07):

Hello everyone and welcome back to the FINITE Podcast. Today I’m talking with Amit Bivas, who is the VP of Marketing at Optimove, a SaaS business in the CRM space that provides a relationship marketing hub, empowering CRM marketers to create and manage large-scale customer journeys. 

Amit started at Optimove when it was just 15 people and has grown with it to now being a 260 person business with a marketing team of 21. One of Amit’s biggest project has been the launch of a standalone publication called PostFunnel. 

I wanted to find out why Optimove decided to launch a standalone publication and a separate brand as such a central part of their content strategy. The advantages it brings and how it delivers commercial value back to Optimove as a business itself. And so that’s what we dive into on this episode. I hope you enjoy.

FINITE (00:53):

The FINITE community and podcasts are kindly supported by 93x, the digital marketing agency working exclusively with ambitious fast-growth B2B technology companies. Visit 93x.agency to find out how they partner with marketing teams in B2B technology companies to drive growth.

Alex (01:13):

Thanks for joining me today,

Amit (01:15):

Hi Alex, thanks for having me.

Alex (01:17):

I’m looking forward to talking. We are diving into a pretty content strategy focused subject today, which is one I think about a lot. Particularly when we look at B2B tech brands, approaching content marketing from different perspectives of building out blogs and having their own sub brands and other properties and all of those kinds of things, which we’ll dive into. But before we do, I will ask you to just tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and your current role and team and how everything works at Optimove at the moment.

About Amit’s career in B2B marketing at Optimove

Amit (01:47):

Sure. So, my name is Amit, father of two, I’m married to one, I live out of Tel Aviv, Israel. My background is industrial engineering. I started my career as a data analyst and somehow grew into marketing. I like to look at myself as an individual that is able to show a good mix of both the left and right lobes of the brain. So both having that type of analytical background and capabilities and being creative enough in order to justify myself as a marketer. 

I’m a homegrown talent, so all of my career is in the same company. My story is quite interesting in that sense. So one of my professors in my engineering studies is the CEO and founder of the company. So it started when I approached him saying, how about we replace the student professor relationship with an employer employee? 

And then I started as a student working as an analyst for the company and continued doing that for quite a while. A lot of data querying and building models and stuff like that in order to consult on a CRM, doing better customer relationship marketing. And at some point when it was a small startup of 15 people, I was asked to lead sales. Then a month after I was offered to lead marketing, which seems quite random but that sounded very interesting. 

And I started leading marketing. It was me and another outsourced vendor, like one and a half people on the team running the basic disciplines of B2B marketing and some content marketing, some PR and regeneration and demand generation obviously. And slowly but surely grew the team. 

So I would, as an individual contributor work on a certain discipline of B2B marketing, grow it to a certain critical mass and then hire someone to take over it. So fast forward 2021 January, the team is 20 people strong, the company Optimove is 260 employees globally. My team works on all disciplines of B2B marketing starting from content to demand generation, to product marketing, to analyst relations, to PR and anything that works. 

And I think that, from looking at my type of goal these days is more of doing smart investments. How to play with marketing knobs, ie. the marketing budgets and resources in order to deliver the highest impact in terms of pipeline generation for sales, translated into revenue contribution and reverse engineer down to which ad platform to spend my next digital marketing dollar. So that’s it in a nutshell.

Alex (04:53):

Pretty good nutshell. And yeah, it’s amazing that you’ve seen the business go from 15 to 260 people. That’s quite a journey. And how long was that? What was the time period that growth has been over? When did the company begin?

Amit (05:05):

So the company began in 2009, as a guard startup. I joined in 2012, that’s what I’ve seen. That’s also the reason that keeps you with a company, you’re seeing different phases of the business and different phases bring different challenges, right? 

So when you’re a small startup, putting your name out there, starting to generate some interest, when you’re larger it’s starting to grow the team in order to support the business growth, and bringing a company to a $1 million of annual recurring revenue to $5 million to $10 million to 30 and North of that different challenges, different types of marketing. That’s what keeps me awake at night, continuing to grow with the business and supporting the growth objectives and initiatives.

Alex (05:53):

Yeah, that’s interesting. And just on that point, before we dive into the more content focused topic, this gets talked about a lot with CEOs and founders. I think more regularly, you often see founders take a business to a certain point and then recognise that they’re not the right person to be the big corporate CEO and needed any further. I think you’d have similar in marketing, right? 

You have some marketers that are quite scrappy, hands-on, generalist marketers. I had a series A founder on the podcast last year who described the difference between a wartime CMO and a peacetime CMO and those two very different outlooks, but you’ve obviously had to develop personally and change your role and get used to very different day-to-day activities and line management. 

Having that many people reporting into you that must’ve come with challenges. And I guess it’s not often that someone can cover the whole breadth of all those roles and actually still on a basic level, enjoy what they do. Sometimes I think some marketers find that they enjoy being the generalist marketer inside all the tools, doing stuff in a team of two or three people. And actually when it gets bigger, they move on and it’s not for them. So has that been a challenge? That journey is on a more personal level for you?

How to grow as a marketer as the business grows 

Amit (07:04):

One hundred percent. It’s also, on a personal level, how you grow aside of the company. So I started here as a late twenties, bachelor, living the life and slowly maturing. Now, I’m a family person, two children and such. And you’re always looking for growth and evolution in your life for sure if you’re an inspirational individual, in which case I am. 

So you’re always looking to look back and see, what progress have I done? That’s what keeps me driving. And I agree a hundred percent that at different phases, requiring different types of marketing. And me personally, and the team that I’m leading has changed significantly throughout the different phases. 

And I could have said at certain points, okay I know how to bring a company to this level from scratch and then go do it again at another company. But I thought it could be a bit boring because I’ve already done that. So yes, I can master in doing that, but I can continue the challenge and type of adventure of, okay, what does the next phase look like? And even at this point, I’m already looking at what does the next phase look like? 

So currently I have a 20 person team with a very nice budget. How does it look with double the size or triple this budget? And I’m making sure that I’m building it and building my expertise and building my experience in order to support that. It’s a different order of magnitude, even in terms of budget and stuff that you need to manage and how do you do it? And I don’t think that there’s a playbook, right? 

You’re growing into it and you’re doing the best that you can, and you don’t have a lot of peers, right? Especially not in Israel. So how do you brainstorm? Who do you speak with? So I was able to luckily find a network of peers that are in the same phase, same space and type of companies in which we can brainstorm. 

And that’s super important because as you go higher in the enterprise levels, then you have less and less peers and less content to read from and less places to educate yourself. So that network is super duper important. That’s what helps me continue to grow or support my growth within the company and the company’s growth in general.

Alex (09:31):

Yeah, that’s a great point. And I felt like you’ve almost given us an advert for FINITE and what we’re building at the FINITE community of marketers coming together to connect and share and learn. So, that definitely resonates. I think, particularly in B2B tech companies, we often find that marketing teams can be quite small even in quite sizeable organisations. 

The marketing organisation itself can be quite siloed and quite small, and that lack of learning and sharing. So yeah, all makes sense. And that’s a great story, I think for anyone that’s listening, so thanks for sharing it. Let’s dive into what we’re going to talk about, which is this idea of creating a standalone publication as the hub of your content strategy at Optimum. 

So we’ll start just by setting the scene. I assume that within your 2020 person team, you’ve got some content specific roles in there, but tell us a little bit about what content at Optimove looks like in broad terms?

What the marketing function at Optimove looks like 

Amit (10:25):

So currently we have a director reporting to me that leads content as director of content marketing. We have a content manager that is more of let’s call it a content operations in that sense, making sure that everything works on a technical and process basis. And we have a team staff writer. 

And in addition, we have a pool of around at any given time, five to 10 writers that would work with them regularly. But you know, they work on a per article basis or per set of article basis. So that’s our resources of textual content generation. In addition to that, we also have the studio that supports all of the marketing. 

We have also an art director leading and three designers, graphic designers, which obviously help with all of the video editing with all of the imagery and so on and so forth. So they support the entire marketing org. I would say roughly 30% to 40% of the studio capacity is towards content marketing initiatives.

Alex (11:38):

Awesome. And so you have created what is effectively a standalone publication and PostFunnel is it’s name. Postfunnel.com, it has its own domain name. The logo is PostFunnel that says by Optimove. I think the big question, this is one that goes debated a lot, and I see more companies heading towards. 

But there has to be a good amount of reason for doing it, is why set up PostFunnel as a standalone brand separate site and its own content hub? Rather than investing in building out all of your content within the main Optimove site? The blog resource hub, et cetera. Tell us a little bit about the thinking that went into that process and why you settled on the standalone property.

Why content should be a separate publication from your company blog

Amit (12:22):

Yeah, so let’s start with going back to 2016 where we were building the strategy, and we’ve always been very invested into content. It’s something that comes from the top of the business down to the last individual contributor practitioner at Optimove. And the founder and CEO of the company is in a way a philosopher, used to blogging before he started the company. 

So when I started into marketing, I mentioned there were one and a half people, myself and another contractor used to put together the content based on the ideation of the founder. So we always had content in it. And so we’re in the space of CRM relationship marketing, in order to distinguish and make it clear. So if you’re a CMO in a large company, usually your investment at a very high level would be either in acquiring new customers or in growing the value of your existing customers. 

So we’re in the business of growing the value of your existing customers. Now going seven, eight years back, you would say, do you do CRM? You communicate, do you engage with your customers? People will say, yeah sure, we have a newsletter. Now we need to build the case back then in a world where it’s much more intuitive to invest in acquisition and bringing in new customers, why should you significantly and strategically invest in your existing customers, what’s in it? How do you do it? 

So it’s both educating the market and also helping to make the case to begin with, to invest in it. And what’s its importance and so on and so forth. We didn’t even look at thought leadership, but it happened because the space was so small and niche in those times. So content marketing was always in our DNA. And I remember that from the beginning, getting a lot of like anecdotal type of feedback, your content is great, it’s very insightful. 

We used to publish back then a blog a month. So very low frequency, but a very high value moving forward. And we started hiring, as I mentioned, my way of growing the team was to grow the discipline to a critical mass and then hire on top of it. So we hired a director of content, a very strong content person back then, and that helped us grow the frequency. 

The idea was again, helping to build that type of case for the prospect to invest in CRM. How do you do it? How do you maximise it or optimise it? What are the different disciplines within CRM marketing and so on and so forth? It was more of educational content. And at some point again, we’ve seen a lot of feedback. We’ve seen a lot of it results from our content marketing. I’m talking about 2016. 

We came to a discussion of how do you scale/double down on your content marketing? And you can continue doing the same at a higher rate or phase or with more resources, or you can try to make big bets. And our big bet was starting our own publication. So, yeah continue working on the Optimove blog or resource centre and putting long form and short form content. How do you take it to the next level? You start your own publication. 

Now, when you start your own publication, it’s a big thing. You want to make sure that you know you have the right talent, the right people, you have what to say and you have an audience and you’re not in a saturated market or a place where you have a lot of voice competition in that sense. So I’ll pause there for a second, because that was pretty much the background and happy to clarify anything or continue the story.

How Amit knew to set up a standalone publication

Alex (16:27):

Yeah. I mean, you’re covering off my questions nicely actually, which is great. Because it means my life as an interviewer is pretty straightforward. So I guess one thing that comes to mind is, when you say taking that next leap, was there a tipping point at which it felt like you hit a glass ceiling in terms of content that you produced within, I assume you just had a blog on the Optimove site up until that point? 

What were the numbers, what were the signals that really made you feel like you could build something standalone. We can talk about the benefits of a standalone brand and how it gives you some independence and opens up other opportunities in a sec, but what were the signals that drove that initially specifically?

Amit (17:08):

So again, you’re looking at either doing more of the same at a higher frequency, but usually when, at least I think about it that way in marketing, if you want to climb above the clutter and make a difference and stand apart from all of the noise, you need to do something different. You can’t keep on doing the same. 

So we looked at a lot of different options back then, but starting our own publication sounded very interesting and not many companies did that in the past. We looked a lot at the example of Adobe’s cmo.com. The big difference was that Adobe acquired the publication and then continued growing it. And there’s always that dilemma of buy versus build, or even to start with this initiative to begin with. 

But it sounded, and again we were smaller than we are today. We were quite adventurous back in the day, and it sounded like an initiative that made a lot of sense. We also had like a lot of discussions with different prospects and different influencers of the industry. And we bounced off that idea and people always thought it was something very innovative, very interesting, and that it could have a lot of value. And we were able to build the case around it, right? 

If our blog today, at some point if you increase the frequency of publishing, you will still see a diminishing return. But if you build something new, it’s like I always love the example of Coke Zero, right? When Coca-Cola decided to launch the brand or launch the product Coke Zero, they already had Diet Coke. But the thesis was that both will have a larger market. Everyone knew that it would have categorisation that Coke Zero will cannibalise Diet Coke, but together they’ll get a larger market share. So I think that was also what we had in mind. 

Yes, we’re aiming at the same audiences from different perspective and different voices, but we’re gonna cannibalise in a way. From a macro perspective, we’ll grow our readership, we’ll grow our touch with the community.

How to separate content between the blog and publication

Alex (19:31):

Cool. I think that word community is an important one, which we can come back to. Maybe I noticed, I was just checking your current site. You have a blog on there currently, it looks nice. Design-wise it almost feels kind of magazine in itself on the Optimove website. 

So how did you begin to make decisions around what type of content goes where? I think you alluded to the fact that you were educating an audience a lot, and I guess teaching them about the values of CRM, at least in the earlier stages. But these days do you have completely separate streams divided by certain categories or certain stages of the buyer journey as to what content goes where between PostFunnel and the Optimove blog.

Amit (20:10):

So as of today, and this took a while because to create a smarter or more effective distinction between the Optimove branded content and the PostFunnel branded content, it took a while but as of today, the difference is a point of view and voice. Optimove’s blog is first person, PostFunnel is third person, more objective, more publication type of voice versus Optimove. You know, it’s more like dear diary, right? 

So about experiences. You write about stuff from a first person perspective. PostFunnel is covering the industry. Also a big distinction that we’ve done is that PostFunnel is writing for the CRM marketer, not necessarily about CRM marketing. And it’s a big difference, right? Writing for the CRM marketer. 

You can write about a whole gamut of topics that would be of interest to that specific person, professional persona. At Optimove, we don’t do that, we write directly about CRM. The business case and we always plug in our solution or our way to go about it. It’s as if we’re trying to translate it into funnel, so it’s a bit lower in the funnel, right? And that’s also one of the initiatives or the goals of PostFunnel, to be above the funnel. It’s not even part of the funnel, it’s above the funnel. 

I would say that our goal, and I might be stealing the thunder in your questions, but the goal of Post Funnel today is to pretty much bring all of our addressable market into one place. They would come there to read content at a high frequency and level. And then at some point when we’ll be able to identify some intent, we’ll introduce Optimove and try to push them into the Optimove funnel.

How to link a publication with your brand

Alex (22:11):

Okay, cool. I think that’s interesting to talk about, is that obviously you’re investing, you’re recognising the value of building a brand, as you described. It’s not even in the funnel, that’s above the top of the Optimove funnel as such, that connection of how you begin to then link them together. 

And we can talk a little bit more later about how you measure the success of PostFunnel generally, but I think different brands approach this differently in terms of how clearly they try to link that main commercial brand with the media brands. I guess you could argue that the weaker the link, the more independence to some extent, and maybe a voice of authority PostFunnel might have as a standalone publication. But then obviously you need to start working in some degree of links so that you begin to see the commercial upside of operating PostFunnel.

And I think that can be quite hard, and a fine line to walk, right? That balance between… I guess if you go too commercial with it, it does become inside your funnel. And it becomes quite a transparent marketing sales tactic, and people feel like they’re being sold to, whereas you’re balancing it so that it’s obviously adding value, which we’ll talk about. 

But still it’s a valuable educational resource, primarily not the entry into the Optimove funnel. So how do you balance the two in terms of how they’re positioned side-by-side? How you talk about them? As I said I saw on the website that you’ve got PostFunnel by Optimove in the logo, but that’s more or less it from what I could see from the website. But yeah, it’d be great to hear more about that side of it.

Amit (23:42):

So, it’s a great question. And you’re touching on that nerve, and that’s always been there from the inception of the idea of creating a new media brand. So, growing it and where we’re going and what are our future plans. So when we started we tried to, and again it’s all about the authenticity, right? You come to a vendor, they’re trying to sell to you and that they’re biased. 

One of the advantages of building a publication is that it’s authentic, it’s unbiased, it’s objective and so on and so forth. So when we started, we didn’t have that ‘by Optimove’ by the way. It was far apart. Just if you clicked on the about us, you were able to see some evidence of Optimove being involved in this. And we thought of the relationship of sponsored by Optimove, right? 

Because if you’re thinking about it, there were many brands, many vendors out there that sponsor different publications or buy media or so on and so forth. So we thought about that relationship. The problem is, or what we came to understand is that one of the things that we wanted is as Optimove, as a marketing initiative, is to own the space, right? When you do these types of initiatives, it signals to the world that you are big enough and knowledgeable enough to start a publication, so I’m the leader of the space. 

So we wanted to make sure that yes, we still keep that authenticity and unbiased, but still tell the world, guys this is ours. And we’re the big boys. We’re the bosses of the industry, right? So after a lot of discussions and brainstorming sessions, we decided to do it by Optimove. It’s still PostFunnel, it’s still its own publication, but it’s by Optimove. 

And the idea here is that you’re saying, yes we started a publication, it has an editor in chief and has its editorial team it’s run by Optimove. And that relationship, or at least as far as we think and want to convey, is that yes, it’s a publication. Yes it’s unbiased, but it’s run by the people that understand this space better than anyone else.

Alex (25:59):

Cool. That’s got me thinking that it all just comes down to one word in some cases. In terms of by or sponsored by, one or two words can carry a lot of weight in terms of that very subtle nuance between how it’s positioned before it was a brand. So that is really interesting.

Amit (26:15):

And another thing that we started doing slowly but surely, is putting advertisements of Optimove inside PostFunnel. So you read a certain article that is related to a certain topic. Then you’ll have like a banner there. It looks like an advertisement, right? And if you visit PostFunnel you’ll see those, an advertisement to Optimove downloadable content. Now what’s nice about this initiative is it enables us to generate direct value to Optimove in terms of regeneration and pushing these into the Optimove funnel. 

But it also gives you a feeling of an authentic publication, right? Because if you think about the publishing world, they’re trying to make money and how do they make money? They sell to advertisers. So in that sense, Optimove is the sole advertiser in PostFunnel. And we’re also playing with the idea of having our partners advertise on PostFunnel. Not to pay for it, obviously, but just to provide value to partners or joint value and provide more value to the readers.

How can content continue evolving? 

Alex (27:23):

Cool, yeah. That sounds like a great idea. So in terms of the evolution of PostFunnel, I assume getting something like this off the ground, there’s a lot of work involved and a certain amount of content. Would you say that content has progressed? You talked about the difference between writing about CRM or for CRM users as such. Looking at those differences, has content evolved? Has it continued to evolve in terms of what you write about on PostFunnel?

Amit (27:50):

So the notion of writing about versus writing for. So when we started PostFunnel, it was more of the first person versus third person. It was more of a frequency of publishing and such the idea of writing for the CRM marketer and writing about CRM marketer is a conclusion we came to later on. 

At some point there’s only so much you can write about CRM, right? There are best practices, there are different use cases, case studies. You can write a lot about it, but at some point we found it challenging to do two things: continue publishing at that frequency, or even increasing the frequency and bringing back the readers. 

Because if you don’t write stuff that is newsworthy, usually it’s going to be very challenging to get people back on a daily or weekly basis. And that’s the frequency that we want it to get. We want it to get to our readers on the website once or twice a week, or at least a few times a month. 

And if you’re not writing content that is more round and not only talking about a certain discipline, that’s the only way you can bring them back time again. So you write about brand marketing in the context of CRM, you write about different marketing disciplines and make it accessible or digested for the CRM market or the CRM executive. So I’m looking at it like a few circles, right? 

The core is CRM marketing. The first circle is about CRM, the next two or three or four circles are for the CRM market, different disciplines of marketing, or even not marketing that are of interest to the CRM marketer. And that enabled us to increase the return visitors to the website and even increase our frequency of publishing. 

So today we have a, we call it B2CRM news, right on the website, on the publication, on daily basis. And only growing those circles and coming to a notion and deciding that we need to write for the CRM market, not about CRM marketing. That was what enabled us to continue growing this initiative.

Alex (30:06):

And so looking forward, it’s not uncommon for all media publishing businesses to be looking at events, round tables. I guess the publication is only one side of their business. I know that Post Funnel isn’t a business in itself for you, but I guess PostFunnel gives you a platform to potentially do much more in terms of building a brand, which can engage with CRM marketers in different ways. Beyond the publication and just producing content, do you see PostFunnel becoming a brand that you do other things within as a vehicle for other activity?

Other ways to build the brand of a publication 

Amit (30:40):

One hundred percent. So I think it was 2018 or 2019. So every year we have a huge customer event, three-day event. It was called, up until 2019 Optimove Connect. And we had a huge discussion here. A lot of stakeholders, a lot of people in the company on rebranding it as Post Funnel summit, right? 

End of the day, there were different pros and cons for any decision. We decided to go with the PostFunnel brand. And the reason is that, the reason you start a publication is authenticity, and the audience that you are able to reach in less of a salesy approach. 

So we decided to go with PostFunnel from a brand perspective and even more. So we had a plan beginning of 2020 to launch a whole series of events, self produced. COVID happened so it changed a lot of it, but also all of the virtual events that we self produced, a lot of our hosts and self produced events are under the PostFunnel brand. I think it contributes a lot and I don’t have any data about this, just more anecdotal examples, to position yourself as a thought leader and rise above the clutter to create more of an industry voice. 

Think about are you going to an event by a vendor or you’re going to an event by the industry publication? So all of our self produced events as of today are branded as PostFunnel events. We have PostFunnel round tables, PostFunnel dinners, home forums and so on and so forth. And in terms of the next step, obviously scanning those and growing that brand of events. 

Also, another interesting example that we’re looking at is what we’re seeing with Daily Brew, right? They are doing some amazing stuff with email marketing, and we think our next big growth avenue of the PostFunnel initiative is launching a series of newsletters. So obviously we do have our newsletters today, but taking it to the next level. 

The daily brew today, they have a publication, they also have a website and everything, but their email list, that’s where they generate the value. The newsletters, that’s where they communicate with their readers. And we’re seeing that happen more and more. 

So that’s the next avenue where we want to, and are already starting to double down and build more significantly. Creating that very sassy type of voice, and it’s a very important distinction in content. You can either be inbound or outbound, right? So inbound is your website. It’s there, you can come and consume the content. 

When you’re outbound in the inbox, it’s a whole different battle. Fighting the cloud of the clutter in the inbox, but you’re there and you need to make it so right to get people opening your emails again and again. And if you do that, you have unlimited access to that person. If, for example, I read jealously The Daily Brew, I get a whole lot of email marketing and a whole lot of email newsletters, but that’s the one that I read on a daily basis. And that’s what we want to reach as a next step.

Alex (34:01):

Big plans. So I guess I want to wrap this up by talking about how you tie PostFunnel back to measuring its success, both in terms of PostFunnel as a standalone brand publication, but then also tying that back to Optimove itself. So where do you start? What are the numbers that you look at? How do you attribute things? 

I know you alluded to having content downloads that might do some lead gen within certain articles and stuff, but it would be great to understand how you approach measuring success of a standalone publication like this.

How to attribute ROI from a separate publication 

Amit (34:32):

So again, if I’m looking at the Optimove funnel, you have the total addressable market and we work almost exclusively in an ABM model. So we do not invest at least in advertising or in paid initiatives that aren’t to an account on that list. So let’s throw around 4,000 companies now. Not all of them at any given time can be in the pipeline. 

So we look at PostFunnel, each and every one of those 4,000 accounts and the relevant functions within those 4,000 accounts should be readers of PostFunnel, no strings attached, free content, relevant content, content that’s of interest and then we’re able to identify intent or put in a few quote on quote traps that if there’s intent, and if you’re starting a buying cycle, then we’ll be the first one to be there and start pushing you into the funnel. 

So obviously we look at the conversion of PostFunnel into the Optimove funnel. Other supportive metrics are amount of time that we’re able to bring to PostFunnel. That’s also a big thing. So we have those 4,000 accounts. How many of them have we brought into? And in certain accounts, obviously those 4,000 accounts are tiered. So giving a higher weight to a higher tiers, and we score every contact or every persona that we bring from the ten into PostFunnel from a business case perspective. 

So we look at the conversion rates, we understand what’s the value of each and every person that we’re able to bring from the ten into PostFunnel and have them subscribe to our newsletter. We could put a number on them, what it’s worth for us. And then that’s how we also build a budget for this initiative. So those are the KPIs we’re looking at. Generally the ability to bring a ten persona or contact into PostFunnel, and then converting them into Optimove at the right time. 

Time is an important thing here. We’re not looking at how long it’s going to take. We’re looking at making sure that we’re there when it’s the right time. So no pressure. We have some not very pressuring types of call to actions to put you into Optimove, but if it’s not the right time, fine, continue reading PostFunnel, continuing and engaging with a publication, we’re there when they need us.

Alex (37:04):

That’s a great and refreshing outlook, but I think it’s one that many marketers probably don’t feel, or they probably don’t have their C-suite or exact team saying to them take as long as you need. So you’ve obviously got plenty of other marketing activity happening and a lot happening directly as Optimove. But I guess having this as a standalone publication gives you a bit more breathing space and allows you to recognise that it’s a long-term play that will pay dividends over time. And that fact that you don’t have to bring in a certain number of leads within a certain time window, relieves the pressure on some parts of your marketing.

Amit (37:35):

I just want to sharpen that point. So it’s not that we’re not looking at the numbers and the value that it brings them without the value. You know, you can kill the initiative. What I’m saying is that in terms of the accounts and when they convert into Optimove, we don’t put pressure there. Right? 

We do put pressure, as you mentioned, in different areas in channels and PostFunnel. Take your time as a leader, as a perspective account. And we’ll make sure to be there at the right time now. Yes, it took some time until we started seeing value. So, there’s a long ramp up phase. It took us almost six to eight months, but then we started seeing the value that it brings in.

Alex (38:13):

Yep. Cool. Well, I think that’s some fascinating insights there. I’m sure a lot of our listeners will be thinking about how they ramp up content marketing will have been having discussions around whether they go down the route of a standalone publication and brand of some kind. 

I think it can be quite a hard debate to have internally. And there’s a long list of pros and cons, depending on how you’re resourced and your growth plans and everything else. But you’ve shared some really useful insights. I think that can help shape our thinking. So I’m super grateful for you sharing everything and for joining me on the podcast.

Amit (38:47):

It’s a big pleasure to be here, and I hope I was able to generate some value for the listeners. Just one important thing to finish things up. Don’t generate content for the sake of generating content. If you don’t have something to say or value to generate for your audience, do something else.

Alex (39:04):

I couldn’t have asked for a better wrap up in summary than that. We’ve had so many debates around quality versus quantity and all the usual stereotypical debates that come up with content marketing. So I think that’s a good note on which to end. So thank you Amit, I’m hugely grateful for you showing you your time and insights with us.

Amit (39:21):

Thanks Alex, cheers. Thanks for having me.

FINITE (39:24):

Thanks for listening. We’re super busy at FINITE building the best community possible for marketers working in the B2B technology sector to connect, share, learn, and grow along with our podcast. We host a monthly online events, run interview series, share curated content and have an active Slack community with members from London, New York, Singapore, Tel Aviv, Stockholm, Melbourne, and many more to strengthen your marketing knowledge and connect with ambitious B2B tech marketers across the globe, head to finite.community and apply for a free membership.

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